A Cabinency Of Dunces

A Cabinency Of Dunces

Victor Davis Hanson, Daily Caller 

As the nation sinks inexplicably into self-created crisis after crisis, debate rages whether President Joe Biden is incompetent, mean-spirited or an ideologue who feels the country’s mess is his success.

A second national discussion revolves around who actually is overseeing the current national catastrophe, given Biden’s frequent bewilderment and cognitive challenges.

But one area of agreement is the sheer craziness of Biden’s cabinet appointments, who have translated his incoherent ideology into catastrophic governance.

Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas has essentially nullified federal immigration law. Over 2 million foreign nationals have illegally crossed the southern border without audit — and without COVID vaccinations and tests during a pandemic.

Mayorkas either cannot or will not follow federal law.

But he did create a new Disinformation Governance Board. To head his new Orwellian Ministry of Truth, he appointed Nina Jankowicz — an arch disinformationist who helped peddle the Russian collusion, Steele dossier and Alfa Bank hoaxes.

While Jankowicz’s adolescent videos and past tweets finally forced her resignation, Mayorkas promises his board will carry on.

In the days before the recent Virginia election, grassroots parent groups challenged critical race theory taught in the schools.

In reaction and under prompts from teachers’ unions, Attorney General Merrick Garland directed both the FBI and the Justice Department to establish a special task force apparently to “investigate threats” from parents against school board members.

The last thing a scandal-plagued FBI needed was to go undercover at school board meetings to investigate parents worried over their children’s education.

We are in a fuel price spiral that is destroying the middle class.

Yet when Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm was asked about plans to lower gas prices, she laughed off the idea as “hilarious.”

Later Granholm preposterously claimed, “It is not the administration policies that have affected supply and demand.”

Apparently haranguing those who finance fossil fuel production, canceling the Keystone Pipeline, suspending new federal oil and gas leases, and stopping production in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge all had nothing to do with high fuel prices.

Currently, supply chain disruptions are paralyzing the U.S. economy.

The huge Port of Los Angeles has been a mess for over a year. Since last fall, dozens of cargo ships have been backed up to the horizon. Thousands of trucks are bottlenecked at the port.

During the mess, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg was not at work. Instead at the height of the crisis, he took a two-month paternity leave to help out his husband and two newborn babies.

Such paternal concern is a noble thing. But Buttigieg is supposed to ensure that life-or-death supplies reach millions of strapped Americans.

This winter, trains entering and leaving Los Angeles were routinely looted in the Old-West style of train robbing — without much of a response from Buttigieg’s transportation bureau.

In Senate testimony, Secretary of the Interior Secretary Deb Haaland refused to explain why her department is slow walking federal oil and gas leases at a time when Americans are paying between $5 and $6 a gallon for gas.

Haaland was unable to provide simple answers about when new leases will result in more supplies of oil and gas. Her panicked aides slid talking points to her — given that in deer-in-the-headlights fashion, she seemed incapable of providing senators with basic information about U.S. energy production on federal lands.

The United States is sending many billions of dollars worth of sophisticated weapons to Ukraine to combat Russian aggression. We rightly claim it is not a proxy war against Russia but instead an effort to help stop a brutal Russian invasion.

Why then did Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin tell the world the very opposite in a fashion that could only convince Russians that our real aim in Ukraine is to destroy Russia as a superpower?

As Austin put it publicly, “We want to see Russia weakened to the degree that it can’t do the kinds of things that it has done in invading Ukraine.”

Even if that description of the agenda is true, why broadcast it — given Russia has over 6,000 nuclear weapons and its President Vladimir Putin is increasingly erratic and paranoid?

The common denominator to these Biden appointees is ideological rigidity, nonchalance and sheer incompetence.

They seem indifferent to the current border, inflation, energy and crime disasters. When confronted, they are unable to answer simple questions from Congress, or they mock anyone asking for answers on behalf of the strapped American people.

We don’t know why or how such an unimpressive cadre ended up running the government, only that they are here and the American people are suffering from their presence.

Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness. He is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author of “The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won,” from Basic Books. You can reach him by e-mailing authorvdh@gmail.com. 

Clinton Lawyer’s Achievement: Getting Donald Trump Elected President

 

Clinton Lawyer’s Achievement: Getting Donald Trump Elected President

Apparently, Michael Sussmann hoped the FBI and New York Times would whip each other into a Trump–Russia collusion frenzy. Instead, they compared notes and torpedoed Clinton’s ‘October surprise.’

Andrew C. McCarthy, National Review

I don't know if Michael Sussmann will be found guilty of making a false statement to the FBI. Special Counsel John Durham’s team has so far put in what appears to be a convincing case, and Sussmann’s defense seems incoherent. The D.C. jury was always going to be tough for Durham, however, and it’s been made tougher still by the judge’s refusal to exclude for cause jurors who were admirably candid about having contributed to Democrats, strongly supported Hillary Clinton, and opposed Donald Trump.

Whether or not Sussmann beats the rap, though, there is some poetic justice here. He and his too-clever-by-half gaggle of Hillary Clinton campaign schemers probably did manage to get Donald Trump elected president. That may be harder for Sussmann to live with than a felony conviction.

As our Isaac Schorr has related (here and here), Durham’s key witness is James Baker. Now a top lawyer for Twitter, Baker in 2016 was the FBI’s general counsel. He has a wealth of national-security-law experience, having served for years as a Justice Department lawyer working foreign counterintelligence matters. And it was that experience that brought him into contact with Michael Sussmann, who similarly worked at DOJ in cybersecurity. Over the years, the colleagues became friends and remained in frequent contact.

Baker is a smart lawyer, introspective and willing to own up to errors, but smoothly articulate. He needed all of that this week, in hours of testimony stretching across parts of three days, that became heated at times. I am not in the courtroom, which is always a disadvantage. But in the reporting, it is not hard to detect some righteous anger below Baker’s serene surface. At the end of Thursday’s combative session, when Sussmann lawyer Sean Berkowitz smarmily reminded Baker that he was under oath and should be mindful of the potential criminal consequences of perjury, it must have required all Baker’s reserves to maintain his even keel.

But he did. It had to help that Baker’s story lines up with the independent evidence. That includes, more prominently, Sussmann’s own unfiltered words, in a text to Baker. There, he insisted that, in bringing the FBI “sensitive” information (about a supposed Trump–Russia communications back channel, it turned out), “I’m coming on my own — not on behalf of a client or company — want to help the Bureau.” That is exactly the misrepresentation Durham has charged against Sussmann, who was actually representing the Clinton campaign.

By contrast, how rich of Sussmann’s counsel to posture as if Baker is the one suffering from a loose association with the truth. Their defense is that Sussmann was representing the Clinton campaign, but then somehow wasn’t when he went to see Baker . . . even though he billed the Clinton campaign for the meeting . . . a meeting for which he prepared with Clinton campaign operatives . . . who were manufacturing this tale about a Trump–Russia communications back channel . . . which just happens to be the very tale that Sussmann peddled to Baker.

Well good luck with that. It’s not the sort of story that would get very far with most people, but hey, they may love it in Washington.

Meantime, Baker’s testimony shed light on a bit of intrigue that backfired royally on the Clinton campaign and may just have helped Trump squeak past Hillary in the 2016 election.

One of the great ironies of that campaign is that, for all Trump’s complaining about the “failing” New York Times and the FBI under former director Jim Comey (of whom Baker is a longtime friend and was a top adviser), the irrefutable fact is that the Gray Lady and the bureau combined to eviscerate the Clinton campaign’s Trump–Russia collusion narrative on the eve of the election, just as that narrative might have gained traction. As Durham has demonstrated, Hillary can probably thank her lawyers for that — and herself.

Durham’s prosecutors convincingly argue that the Clinton camp was plotting an “October surprise”: explosive press revelations that the FBI suspected Trump was a clandestine agent of Russia. In autumn 2016, Sussmann pushed the “Trump–Putin secret Alfa Bank back channel” on Eric Lichtblau, then of the New York Times. Lichtblau was skeptical. To raise the ante in a way that might make the story more attractive to the Times, Sussmann sought to entice the FBI into investigating the matter, trading on his personal relationship with Baker and his credentials as a former government official who cared deeply about American national security.

Sussmann’s defense now claims he went to the FBI, not on behalf of the Clinton campaign, but as a good citizen — you know, the kind of good citizen who billed the Clinton campaign for his time meeting Baker. Sussmann did this, his lawyers now maintain, even though it was against the campaign’s interest. How so? Because Sussmann must have known the FBI would contact the Times and get Lichtblau to hold off on running the story, when what the campaign most wanted was for the story to be published.

It’s a preposterous defense (although, again, who knows, maybe it’ll fly in Gomorrah on the Potomac). All we’ve heard from the defense about Sussmann so far is what a high-minded, ethical lawyer he is. Well, as a well-compensated Clinton campaign lawyer, Sussmann had a professional duty of fealty to his client; therefore, he would never have taken a position, based on personal considerations, that would harm the campaign’s interests. Moreover, as he prepared for his meeting with the FBI, Sussmann was collaborating closely with his partner Marc Elias (the top Clinton campaign lawyer) and Fusion GPS (the information firm Elias retained to dig up Russia dirt on Trump, which helped curate the data package Sussmann gave Baker). But most obviously, Sussmann and his lawyers are employing the common ploy of concocting a defense in hindsight, based on the things they now know happened, as opposed to what Sussmann and his confederates were thinking at the time. They now know that the FBI did approach the Times, so they’re spinning a yarn about how the campaign would never have wanted that. In point of fact, at the time, it was exactly what the campaign wanted.

Sussmann knew Lichtblau had doubts about the Alfa Bank data — doubts we can assume were well-founded given this week’s FBI testimony about how nonsensical the package Sussmann presented to Baker was. (See Isaac Schorr’s report, here.) The campaign was betting that the Times would become more interested in the story if the paper knew the FBI was alarmed about a possible Trump–Putin back channel. As Baker explained in his testimony,

Sometimes reporters would want to report about the fact that the FBI was investigating something even if they did not have confidence in the underlying information. . . . They’re not reporting necessarily about the thing. They’re reporting about the FBI investigating the thing.

The Clinton campaign hedged its bets, though. While Sussmann worked on Lichtblau and the bureau, Fusion GPS — in consultation with Sussmann and Elias, and with the approval of Hillary Clinton herself — peddled the Alfa Bank tale to other reporters. They hit paydirt with progressive journalist Franklin Foer. (See Isaac’s Schorr’s report on the testimony of Fusion’s Lauren Seago.) On October 31, Foer’s blockbuster, “Was a Trump Server Communicating With Russia?”, was published by Slate. The October surprise was emerging. As the Clinton campaign had hoped, just eight days before the election, there was now a big national story alleging that Internet researchers had found a communications pipeline between the GOP candidate and the Kremlin.

Of course, Slate is not the New York Times. A Franklin Foer piece, while influential in some circles, could not have the same impact as a Times report that said the FBI was investigating Trump. That’s what Clinton campaign officials were still banking on, and with Sussmann having set the wheels in motion at the Times and the FBI, they still anticipated it would happen. Meantime, as soon as the Foer report was hot off the presses, Hillary Clinton and her adviser, Jake Sullivan, pounced, hyping the Alfa Bank story and boldly predicting that we’d soon learn that law enforcement was hounding Trump.

You may recall the tweets from Clinton and Sullivan from my late April column (excerpting reporting from the Washington Examiner’s Jerry Dunleavy):

On Halloween 2016, Clinton tweeted, “Donald Trump has a secret server. . . . It was set up to communicate privately with a Putin-tied Russian bank.”

Clinton later tweeted, “Computer scientists have apparently uncovered a covert server linking the Trump Organization to a Russian-based bank.”

She also shared a lengthy statement by then-Clinton campaign adviser, and President Joe Biden’s current national security adviser, Jake Sullivan. “This could be the most direct link yet between Donald Trump and Moscow,” Sullivan claimed. “This secret hotline may be the key to unlocking the mystery of Trump’s ties to Russia.”

Sullivan added, “We can only assume that federal authorities will now explore this direct connection between Trump and Russia.”

It was all going so well for Team Hillary . . . until the Times and the Comey FBI ruined everything.

As Baker testified this week, Sussmann told him the Times might be poised to run a story (though this was not actually the case because of Lichtblau’s skepticism). So Baker and the FBI did exactly what Sussmann and the Clinton campaign must have calculated that they’d do: They reached out to the Times. Baker, accompanied by the FBI’s then-top counterintelligence agent and its then-media relations official, held a meeting with Lichtblau and Steven Lee Myers of the Times. The bureau’s objective was to get the Times to delay publishing a story, which would allow some time for investigation, since if there was a communications back channel, there wouldn’t be the moment the Times exposed it.

Baker said Lichtblau tried to probe “how seriously we were taking this allegation and the extent to which we thought there was some type of nefarious activity between the Trump Organization and Russia.” That was to be expected, but the FBI officials may have been surprised by the reporter’s transparency. Lichtblau, Baker recalled, explained that Times reporters “weren’t quite persuaded yet about . . . whether this material showed the existence of a surreptitious communications channel.”

In essence, Sussmann and the Clinton campaign miscalculated. They assumed the FBI’s interest would be enough to induce the Times to run a story that Trump was in cahoots with the Kremlin even if reporters had serious doubts about the underlying data. Sussmann also appears to have overlooked an unavoidable aspect of relations between government investigators and the press. The Justice Department and the FBI do not like to ask the media for favors, such as delaying publication of a story, because you often have to give something to get something. Generally, the something that investigators end up giving journalists is an unusually expansive degree of insight into the matter under investigation.

And that’s what happened. To get an accommodation from the Times, the FBI agreed to a follow-up meeting, which Baker said happened a week or two later. The bureau officials acknowledged to Lichtblau that the FBI “had concluded that the materials we had obtained by Sussmann,” plus whatever the FBI did to “augment” and investigate, “did not substantiate that there was a surreptitious communications channel.”

The rest is history. On the same day that Foer’s Slate story appeared, and that Hillary Clinton and Jake Sullivan mobilized on Twitter, the Times published a report by Lichtblau and Myers — “Investigating Donald Trump, F.B.I. Sees No Clear Link to Russia” — which completely destroyed the Clinton campaign’s collusion narrative, and in particular the Alfa Bank smear.

The story, over which the Times kicked itself after Trump’s stunning upset win over Clinton, explained:

For much of the summer, the F.B.I. pursued a widening investigation into a Russian role in the American presidential campaign. Agents scrutinized advisers close to Donald J. Trump, looked for financial connections with Russian financial figures, searched for those involved in hacking the computers of Democrats, and even chased a lead — which they ultimately came to doubt — about a possible secret channel of email communication from the Trump Organization to a Russian bank.

Law enforcement officials say that none of the investigations so far have found any conclusive or direct link between Mr. Trump and the Russian government. And even the hacking into Democratic emails, F.B.I. and intelligence officials now believe, was aimed at disrupting the presidential election rather than electing Mr. Trump.

Specifically on the back-channel canard, the Times related that agents had 

focused particular attention on what cyberexperts said appeared to be a mysterious computer back channel between the Trump Organization and the Alfa Bank, which is one of Russia’s biggest banks and whose owners have longstanding ties to Mr. Putin.

F.B.I. officials spent weeks examining computer data showing an odd stream of activity to a Trump Organization server and Alfa Bank. Computer logs obtained by The New York Times show that two servers at Alfa Bank sent more than 2,700 “look-up” messages — a first step for one system’s computers to talk to another — to a Trump-connected server beginning in the spring. But the F.B.I. ultimately concluded that there could be an innocuous explanation, like a marketing email or spam, for the computer contacts.

In the end, Sussmann got his New York Times story about an FBI investigation of Trump. But the October surprise was on Hillary. The lawyer seems to have thought he was a puppet master, pulling the strings of the nation’s most prominent newspaper and law-enforcement agency. But when they compared notes, it was the Clinton campaign that ended up tied in knots. Indeed, the story not only eviscerated the Trump–Russia collusion claims (at least as an election issue); it reminded readers that the FBI had reopened the Hillary Clinton emails investigation. That investigation would be re-closed a few days later, but the damage was done.

Watching Michael Sussmann’s trial defense, one senses the weaving of another tangled web. Maybe he won’t get caught in this one. But he’ll always be tethered to the last one.

ANDREW C. MCCARTHY is a senior fellow at National Review Institute, an NR contributing editor, and author of BALL OF COLLUSION: THE PLOT TO RIG AN ELECTION AND DESTROY A PRESIDENCY. @andrewcmccarthy

Everyman’s Bill Buckley

 

Everyman’s Bill Buckley

M. Stanton Evans was ahead of his time, foreseeing many of the problems we face today.

by Daniel Oliver, Claremont Review 

According to Steven Hayward, M. Stanton Evans was the perfect conservative. He was a journalist of the first rank; a political activist; a thinker and theorist (one of the rare writers who is “both literate and numerate, conversant with physics as well as with metaphysics”); and ahead of his time in perceiving the issues we’re struggling with today. He foresaw the extra-constitutional nature of the administrative state, the class interests of the elites and their hostility to traditional culture, and the oppressive conformity of university campuses. His first book, Revolt on the Campus (1961), for example, describes two phenomena that we today call “political correctness” and “cancel culture.” It’s easy now to say “of course.” But Evans was onto these issues decades ago.

A Claremont Institute senior fellow and U.C. Berkeley senior resident scholar, Hayward has produced a splendid biography of Evans that doubles as a history of the conservative movement from its earliest days. It’s probably unsettled whether the movement’s Big Bang occurred in 1955 when William F. Buckley, Jr., founded National Review magazine, or in 1951 when he published God and Man at Yale. Regardless, the Left had fair warning. And Evans was there almost from the beginning, graduating from Yale in 1955.

* * *

Like Buckley, Evans had a father to help form his early opinions. Medford Evans wrote an article in 1957 explaining “Why I Am an Anti-Intellectual,” in which he called modern intellectuals “treacherous and stupid.” Plus ça change! Evans almost certainly heard that from his father for years. And when he got to Yale, Evans concluded as Buckley had that the people in Yale’s religion department didn’t appear to believe in God. Today, Harvard University’s chaplain is an atheist. Neither Evans nor Buckley would have been surprised.

Buckley was, if not suave, at least polished and proper; Evans was much simpler, much more like America, and much more like most conservatives than the posh members of Republican country clubs. As one friend described it, Evans would sit in his apartment “in a pair of old khakis and an undershirt, chomping on a loaf of Wonder Bread, washed down by a bottle of Big Grape while watching Roller Derby on TV.” In my obituary of Evans, which Hayward quotes, I called him “everyman’s Bill Buckley.” Just so.

In 1960, the polished and proper Bill Buckley and the everyman’s Bill Buckley gathered at the Buckley family estate in Sharon, Connecticut, with about 90 other young conservatives to form Young Americans for Freedom (YAF). One of the most important pieces Evans ever wrote was the now-legendary Sharon Statement, the founding principles of YAF. It could have been written last week. It begins, “In this time of moral and political crisis….”

* * *

Evans was right on too many issues to be mentioned in a review, and some took place long ago. One example: John F. Kennedy’s “missile gap.” Running against Dwight Eisenhower’s successor-not-to-be Vice President Richard Nixon, Kennedy accused Eisenhower of having allowed a “missile gap” to develop between the U.S. and the  USSR. It was all fiction, typical of the Kennedys. But Evans was skeptical of the Kennedy claim—and of Kennedy—right from the beginning. In a review of Victor Lasky’s book, JFK: The Man and the Myth (1963), Evans wrote,

When we peel away the surface trapping of family glamor and exalted utterance to discover what core of philosophy lies beneath, we find only a great emptiness. The tinseled wrapping is pure Madison Avenue, but what it conceals is just as implausible—a yawning void of ambition, unadorned by visible convictions on any major political issue.

Evans knew Camelot was a fantasy.

President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs were another target of Evans, noting early on that they were turning into a sinecure for “caring” professionals of the welfare state. JFK’s brother-in-law Sargent Shriver, head of Johnson’s Office of Economic Opportunity, complained about an Evans column but proved his point: “I am confident that the new importance the War on Poverty is giving to the helping professions will have a beneficial effect both locally and nationally on the often inadequate salaries in those fields.” Evans understood the war between the Right and Left is really “a war between the permanent government and the elected government.”

Then came Ronald Reagan. It’s a long story of course, beginning many years before Reagan was first elected governor of California in 1966 and before the 1976 Republican National Convention that nominated Gerald Ford. But Evans was clear-eyed on the limits of personality. He wrote in The Future of Conservatism (1968), “It is tempting to suggest that, if Ronald Reagan did not exist, conservative Republicans would have to invent him. Tempting, but mistaken.” The point: ideas were more important than personalities.

Watergate was a disaster. Evans famously said he was for Nixon after Watergate. But he also wrote about the media’s double standard: how the Kennedy and Johnson administrations had bugged Republican campaigns using government agencies. “It is noteworthy,” he added, “that the people who most loudly condemn this clandestine effort to gather data on the Democrats are the self-same people who think it was fine for Daniel Ellsberg to abscond with data from the Pentagon and for the New York Times to publish it.”

* * *

By 1974 Reagan was an ever-growing presence in the Republican Party and the conservative movement. His speech at the 1974 Conservative Political Action Conference was well received, but was written up in National Review by a reporter who described the speech as “a rousing, lively speech, but not deep…. The crowd loved it. But there were skeptics, especially by the next morning, perhaps when they tried to remember what it was he had really said.” Evans wrote to Reagan telling him to ignore the criticism. That apparently made Reagan happy, but not his wife. Nancy Reagan called Bill Rusher, the publisher of National Review, to complain. But the reporter was not criticized by anyone at National Review, and in the following years Reagan gave more ideological and specific speeches.

But the 1974 speech didn’t really matter. Reagan was on the move. It would be inaccurate to say nothing could have stopped him, because in fact something almost did in 1976. Chasing the Republican nomination for president, he proposed a cut in the budget of about 25% and a cut in taxes of about the same amount. Collective Washington almost had a heart attack. Then, despite early polls showing Reagan surging ahead of President Ford, he lost the New Hampshire primary and the next five primaries as well. It looked like the end of the road.

But Evans didn’t give up. He flew to North Carolina to inject some badly needed enthusiasm—and cash (from the American Conservative Union)—into the campaign. Reagan won an upset victory. Veteran journalist Lou Cannon wrote that North Carolina was the turning point in Reagan’s political career. Jameson Campaigne, Jr., gave Evans the credit: “Without Stan Evans, it is quite likely there would have been no Reagan in 1980.”

The Reagan Administration was not without problems and disappointments for conservatives, and Evans was perfectly willing to criticize. He supposed, correctly, that there were hostile (i.e., non-conservative) forces afoot in the White House. Hayward tells the stories.

Hayward also writes about Evans’s journalism and his founding of the National Journalism Center (NJC), a school for young, aspiring conservative journalists. Evans was a brilliant journalist and he encouraged students to avoid “horse race journalism,” the kind that focuses on whether a bill will get enacted or a candidate will win rather than on what the bill or the candidate would do. And he would tell his students, “If your mother says she loves you, check it out.” The NJC was a terrific success. Many well-known journalists, such as John Fund, Ann Coulter, Mark Tapscott, Bill McGurn, and Malcolm Gladwell, are graduates. But money was always tight. A friend suggested to Evans that he ask each graduate to contribute $100 to the school each year—where the instruction had been free—after he had secured a paying job. Evans never did. By 2002 more than 1,600 students had been lucky enough to attend the NJC. The school could have been self-supporting.

* * *

Evans wrote ten books, but his most serious and philosophical was The Theme is Freedom (1994) which, as Evans says in the acknowledgments, “was a long time coming.” That kind of writing is…hard. Hayward says, “William F. Buckley Jr. gave up on writing a large synoptic statement of conservative political philosophy, finding the effort so discouraging that he took up writing novels instead.” You can see why.

As a final treat for readers, Hayward compiles Evans’s greatest quips, which include “Gridlock is the next best thing to having a constitution” and “The problem with pragmatism is that it doesn’t work.” That alone is worth the price of admission. But there’s one more Stan Evans witticism that is not on Hayward’s list.

Shortly before he died, Evans called me and asked if I would take over as chairman of the Education and Research Institute, which he had started decades earlier. You do not say no to an old friend near death from pancreatic cancer. So I said yes. He thanked me and then deadpanned, conspiratorially: “Dan, I’m not dying, but I don’t want anyone to know it.” A month or so later, he was dead. Perhaps he wanted it to be his last public witticism. Now it is.

You can read biographies of any number of prominent people who couldn’t hold a candle to the effect Stan Evans had on the politics of this country and, therefore, on the world. He was a remarkable man, as those of us who knew him for decades realized and as Steven Hayward has shown conclusively in this biography. The book is terrific—partly, of course, because Stan Evans is a terrific subject; but also because Hayward has done a magnificent job organizing the material and telling the story. Will some of the people mentioned, and their relatives and survivors, be unhappy with the result? I certainly hope so.

Daniel Oliver served as chairman of the Federal Trade Commission under President Ronald Reagan. He is currently a senior director of the White House Writers Group and a director of the Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy in San Francisco.

The Exasperated American

 

The Exasperated American

Will the voters channel their furor at this regime of lies into an unprecedented turnout at the polls in November? 

Victor Davis Hanson, American Greatness  

A large majority of Americans now have no confidence in Joe Biden and his administration, which often polls below 40 percent, with negatives nearing 60 percent.

Despite the 15-month catastrophe of his regime, the level of his own unpopularity remains understandable but still remarkable. After all, in 2020 voters already knew well of his cognitive deficits and the radicalism of his agenda. They saw both clearly starting in 2019 and during the 2020 Democratic primaries, the primary debates, and the general election.

So what did Biden’s voters imagine would happen when a cognitively challenged president, controlled by hard-Left subordinates, entered office—other than what he has done?

Now, as then, the media is fused to the progressive agenda and does—and did—its best to turn a non-compos mentis Biden into a bite-your-lip centrist empath in the Bill Clinton “I feel your pain” mode.

The American people know that on every occasion their president speaks, he will slur his words at best. At worst, he will have little idea where he is, where he has been, or what he is supposed to be saying or doing. When he is momentarily cognizant, he is at his meanest, or he simply makes things up.

Our new normal of a mentally incapacitated president is not entirely new in American history—Woodrow Wilson was an invalid during the last months of his presidency. But Wilson’s condition was well hidden. Quite novel is the idea that the American people know the man in the White House is cognitively disabled and simply expect him to confirm that bleak diagnosis each time he opens his mouth.

If Donald Trump exaggerated, Biden flat out lies daily. His most recent untruth was his assertion that the MAGA movement represents “the most extreme political organization that’s existed in American history.” Biden cannot really believe that roughly half the country is now more dangerous than Antifa, Black Lives Matter, the Weathermen, the American Nazi Party, the American Communist Party, and the Ku Klux Klan. And this comes from the mythically moderate “good old Joe from Scranton”?

The bullied people also know the Biden problem has no remedy. The 25th Amendment that Democrats and the Left raised nonstop in efforts to remove Trump—from the Rosenstein-McCabe wear-a-wire embarrassment and former Yale psychiatrist Bandy X. Lee’s congressional tomfoolery to the incessant Montreal Cognitive Assessment demands—won’t apply to Biden.

Either the media will continue to rebrand his incapacity as Ciceronian eloquence or it will privately gloat that Kamala Harris is so off-putting, so uninformed, so unpopular that the people would prefer an amnesiac Biden to a nonimpaired Harris. The truth is, the three doyens of Democratic progressivism—Joe Biden, Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.)—all struggle with cognitive decline and rely heavily upon the media and the Democratic Party’s political attack machine to enjoy asymmetrical exemption. (Though, in Feinstein’s case, her support is wavering.)

Americans feel there is no remedy for this downward spiral until November. To get a sense of their dilemma, imagine a Richard Nixon in 1973 caught lying during Watergate but with Spiro Agnew waiting in the wings without a trace of scandal—except with one difference: the current media is now attacking not the president’s shortcomings, but the president’s critics who point them out.

Even if the Republicans were to win a 60-vote majority in the Senate, they would hesitate to impeach Biden simply because Harris is a more frightening prospect. And some Marquess of Queensberry centrist RINOs would not wish to codify the Democrats’ new standard of impeaching an opposition president the minute he loses the House of Representatives in his first midterm.

Most of the country has awakened to the fact that the Trump-Russia collusion story was essentially a Hillary Clinton campaign effort to destroy a political opponent, a presidential transition, and a presidency. And they know Clinton will never be indicted for her conspiracies and racketeering even if her minions rat her out to seek reduced charges for themselves.

That hoax was followed by an impeachment vote over a phone call based on two more lies: 1) the Biden family was neither corrupt nor used Joe Biden’s office as vice president and his future political career to leverage payments from Ukraine, and 2) Donald Trump canceled military aid to Ukraine rather than sent them critical Javelin anti-tank missiles put on hold by the Obama Administration.

Americans know Google, Facebook, and Twitter censors were all enlisted in the effort to destroy a former president and his outspoken supporters. And they know there is no real remedy unless two or three more enlightened billionaires follow Elon Musk’s lead.

If Roe v. Wade were to be repealed, many Americans in red states will remain appalled that some blue states will allow abortions, especially late-term abortions after 22 weeks. But nearly all will accept the rule of constitutional democracy and thus the states’ rights to make their own laws that do not conflict with federal legislation as passed by Congress and signed by the president.

These red-state citizens know the opposite is certainly not true: blue state officials will do all they can to attack those who disagree with them, who consider abortion the destruction of human life in the womb. Expect more California-style official travel bans.

Americans know that the Department of Homeland Security’s new “Disinformation Governance Board” will, by design, be run by an arch-disinformationist Nina Jankowicz. The board’s entire purpose is to coordinate with the media to brand oppositional expression as “hate speech” and “mis-, dis-, and mal-information” so that critics preemptively self-censor and moderate their opposition.

In this regard, they know that the Biden regime awards positions of great power in the U.S. government to those who do the very opposite of the intended offices’ purview. The goal is pure nihilism.

Thus, a mythographer and propagandist will adjudicate “truth.” A homeland security secretary will do his best to make the border entirely insecure. The secretary of transportation will see to it that freeways and bridges are not built. The department of energy’s task will be to ensure less energy is produced and its transportation is more expensive and more dangerous than ever. And the secretary of defense will oversee the most humiliating retreat in modern American history in Afghanistan as he cites our chief existential threat to be either climate change or “white supremacists.”

The people know the Left eventually always loses the support of the voters. But leftists still believe they can achieve and retain power, given that they control America’s cultural and informational institutions.

The Left remains hell-bent on radically changing the demography of the United States. And it always manufactures new hysterias—from the claim that Trump was “100 percent responsible” for every American death during the COVID-19 pandemic, to border officers “whipping” innocent illegal aliens, to Vladimir Putin single-handedly causing sky-high gas prices and the worst inflation since the 1970s. Each week brings another prairie fire hysteria. No sooner than it is exposed and refuted, and the Left is on to another conflagration.

Americans have a rough idea that the tragic death of George Floyd was not proof of an epidemic of lethal police shootings of black males. Yet that single death set off the entire woke conflagration of 2020 and, with the hysterias of the lockdowns, has nearly wrecked the country.

Yet in 2021, out of more than 10 million arrests in the United States, police shot about six unarmed black men. The same year, 346 police officers were shot, 63 fatally—to left-wing indifference. Moreover, roughly 8,000 blacks were murdered mostly by other blacks—to callous media and political silence. Thousands of lost black lives mattered little—except the fewer than 1 in 1,000 of that total who were tragically and lethally shot while unarmed by police.

Finally, Americans were angry at the rioting inside the Capitol on January 6, 2021. But they cannot forgive the needless lies surrounding that illegal act in an effort to fabricate an insurrection out of a spontaneous buffoonish riot.

So they recoil at the lies about Officer Brian Sicknick’s death. They are baffled about the silence surrounding the number of FBI informants among the January 6 protestors. They are angry about the lies surrounding the lethal shooting of an unarmed Ashli Babbitt. They don’t understand the refusal to release all videos or communications pertinent to the government’s reaction to the riot. And they do not fathom the disproportionate treatment of those charged with unlawfully entering the Capitol versus those 14,000 arrested during the summer of 2020, when rioting led to more than 35 deaths, some 1,500 police officer injuries, and $2 billion in property damage and massive looting.

They shake their heads when Senator Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) directly threatened two Supreme Court judges by name outside the court, ginning up an angry protest group at the doors. They are baffled that the White House press secretary sees nothing wrong with disseminating the private addresses of Justices in order to ensure mobs of protestors show up at their homes to intimidate them.

Of course, exasperated Americans are furious over the open border. They are angry their lives are being insidiously destroyed by the Biden inflation and energy prices. They are humiliated by the Biden debacle in Afghanistan and angrier still over his spiking crime wave and his mean-spirited senility. They resent Biden’s efforts to blame all these self-inflicted miseries on Donald Trump, or the “Putin price hikes” or the inability of a presidency to do anything about supposedly organic forces beyond his purview.

But behind the popular furor is a sense of impotence in the face of the untruth they are assaulted with day after day. In other words, bullied Americans are angry that people who control the nation’s institutions deliberately mislead them and do so because they hate them.

Let us hope that they channel this historic exasperation in November in a manner we have never seen before in the modern era.

About Victor Davis Hanson

Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness and the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. He is an American military historian, columnist, a former classics professor, and scholar of ancient warfare. He has been a visiting professor at Hillsdale College since 2004. Hanson was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2007 by President George W. Bush. Hanson is also a farmer (growing raisin grapes on a family farm in Selma, California) and a critic of social trends related to farming and agrarianism. He is the author most recently of The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won, The Case for Trump and the newly released The Dying Citizen.

King Joe Can’t Transfer Student-Loan Debt

King Joe Can’t Transfer Student-Loan Debt

Americans have become increasingly and disturbingly accepting of life under the executive rule. 

Jeffrey H. Anderson, American Greatness

Transferring hundreds of billions of dollars of student-loan debt—as Joe Biden is reportedly considering—would be unjust, indiscriminate, and remarkably irresponsible. It would force everyday Americans who didn’t take out those loans to shoulder their burden in the form of higher taxes or increased national debt (which, inevitably, leads to higher taxes). But none of this matters as much as the worst thing about such a potential action: It would be a naked violation of our constitutional forms, a move more monarchical than republican.

Both the Constitution and the founders’ writings make it clear that Congress has the power to make federal laws (subject to a presidential veto) and the power of the purse. Biden has neither, and yet he wishes to exercise both in this instance. 

Even House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has said, “People think that the president of the United States has the power for debt forgiveness. He does not. He can postpone. He can delay. But he does not have that power. That has to be an act of Congress.” 

In case anyone missed the point, Pelosi added: “The president can’t do it. So that’s not even a discussion. Not everybody realizes that.”

Among those not realizing this fact is Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), who last week called on Biden to transfer up to $50,000 per person in student-loan debt, from those who took out the loans and benefitted from them to those who didn’t. Recalling Barack Obama’s phone-and-pen presidency, Schumer said Biden could offer student debt relief with “the flick of a pen.”

Biden, sounding characteristically confused, said at a town hall earlier this year, “I’m prepared to write off the $10,000 debt, but not $50,000 . . . Because I don’t think I have the authority to do it by signing with a pen.”

Americans have become increasingly and disturbingly accepting of life under executive rule. During COVID, this was the norm rather than the exception, as executives—following the lead of narrow-minded public-health officials—repeatedly imposed lockdowns and mask and vaccine mandates. Legislatures, the closest representatives of the people, often passed laws to end such mandates. This indicated the broad public opposition to coercive decrees—because legislatures, unlike executives, generally track closer to the will of their citizenry.

Witness the recent Senate vote to end Biden’s mask mandate on airplanes, which was taken before a federal judge overturned that mandate. All but one of the five Democratic senators who face a tough reelection campaign this year—Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.), Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.), Michael Bennet (D-Colo.), and Maggie Hassan (D-N.H.)—voted with Republicans to overturn (by a tally of 57-40) Biden’s mandate. (Only one Republican voted to keep the mandate in place: Mitt Romney.)

If Biden can’t get his policy ideas through Congress—even though his party controls both chambers—it’s because his ideas aren’t popular. That’s not a sign that the constitutional system is broken and needs to be circumvented via executive fiat. It’s a sign that the system, with its checks and balances, is working. But now Biden is flirting with doing an unconstitutional end-run around those checks. 

James Madison taught us that the separation of powers is one-half of the “double security” to our liberties (with the other half being federalism). Lincoln taught us that adherence to our constitutional forms is always more important than any single policy issue, no matter how momentous. Both were right. 

As John Locke put it, a “Community” or “Society” may choose to “put the powers of making Laws . . . into the hands of one Man, and then it is a Monarchy.” He elaborated, “For the Form of Government depending upon the placing [of] the Supreme Power, which is the Legislative . . . such is the Form of the Common-wealth” (italics in original).

If Biden acts unilaterally and usurps the power of Congress, it would be further evidence of the Democratic Party’s drift away from working-class Americans and toward the college-educated. It would make all those who worked hard to pay back their student loans and now get to take on a share of the burden of others’ loans look like suckers (albeit honorable ones). It will be an example of gross public irresponsibility (adding to our $30 trillion national debt) while encouraging rampant private irresponsibility in the future (as people take out “loans” they have no intention of ever repaying). Worst of all, it would be a violation of our republican form of government.

About Jeffrey H. Anderson

Jeffrey H. Anderson is president of the American Main Street Initiative and served as director of the Bureau of Justice Statistics at the U.S. Department of Justice from 2017 to 2021.